Lehrer, Jonahan. How We Decided

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How does this emotional brain system work? The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), the part of the brain that Elliot was missing, is responsible for integrating visceral emotions into the decision­ making process. It connects the feelings generated by the "primi­ tive" brain—areas like the brain stem and the amygdala, which is in the limbic system—to the stream of conscious thought. When a person is drawn to a specific receiver, or a certain en­ trée on the menu, or a particular romantic prospect, the mind is trying to tell him that he should choose that option. It has al­ ready assessed the alternatives—this analysis takes place outside of conscious awareness—and converted that assessment into a positive emotion. And when he sees a receiver who's tightly cov­ ered, or smells a food he doesn't like, or glimpses an ex-girlfriend, it is the OFC that makes him want to get away. {Emotion and motivation share the same Latin root, movere, which means "to move.") The world is full of things, and it is our feelings that help us choose among them.

When this neural connection is severed—when our OFCs can't comprehend our own emotions—we lose access to the wealth of opinions that we normally rely on. All of a sudden, you no longer know what to think about the receiver running a short post pattern or whether it's a good idea to order the cheese­ burger for lunch. The end result is that it's impossible to make decent decisions. This is why the OFC is one of the few cortical regions that are markedly larger in humans than they are in other primates. While Plato and Freud would have guessed that the job of the OFC was to protect us from our emotions, to fortify reason against feeling, its actual function is precisely the oppo­ site. From the perspective of the human brain, Homo sapiens is the most emotional animal of all.

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4

It's not easy making a daytime soap opera. The demands of the form are grueling: a new episode has to be filmed nearly every single day. No other type of popular entertainment churns out so much material in so short a time. New plot twists have to be dreamed up, new scripts have to be written, actors need to re­ hearse, and every scene must be meticulously mapped out. Only then, once all that preparation is complete, are the cameras turned on. For most daytime soaps, it takes about twelve hours to film twenty-two minutes of television. This cycle is repeated five days a week.

Herb Stein has been directing Days of Our Lives, a soap op­ era on NBC, for twenty-five years. He's shot more than fifty thousand scenes and has cast hundreds of different actors. He's been nominated for eight daytime Emmys. Over the course of his long career, Stein has witnessed more scenes of melo­ drama—rapes, weddings, births, murders, confessions—than just about any other human being alive. He is, one might say, an expert on melodrama: how to write it, block it, film it, edit it, and produce it.

For Stein, the long road to daytime television began when he was a student at UCLA and read The Oresteia, the trilogy of classic Greek tragedies written by Aeschylus. It was the utter timelessness of the plays—their ability to speak to enduring hu­ man themes—that made him want to study theater. When Stein talks about drama—and it doesn't matter if he's talking about Aeschylus or General Hospital—he tends to sound like a litera­ ture professor. (He also looks like one, with his rumpled shirts and a few days' worth of salt-and-pepper stubble.) Stein talks in long, digressive monologues and finds grand ideas in the most unlikely plot lines. "Many of these classic plays have elements of

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the ridiculous," he says. "The plots are often completely implau­ sible. That whole Oedipus thing? Totally absurd. And yet, when these stories are told well, you don't notice the absurdity. You're too busy paying attention to what's happening."

Soap operas work the same way. The key to being a success­ ful soap opera director—and Stein is one of the most successful in the business—is telling the story so that people don't notice you're telling them a story. Everything has to feel sincere, even when what's happening onscreen is completely outlandish. This is much harder than it might seem. Let's say you're shooting a scene in which a woman is giving birth to fraternal twins fa­ thered by two different men, both of whom are at the bedside with her. One of the fathers is the villain of the show: he impreg­ nated the woman by raping her. The other father is the good guy, and the woman is deeply in love with him. However, if she doesn't marry her rapist, then members of her family will be killed. (This is an actual plot line from a recent Days of Our Lives episode.) The scene has several pages of intense dialogue, a few tears, and plenty of subtext. Stein has about an hour to shoot it, which forces him to make some crucial decisions on the fly. He has to figure out where each character should stand, how they all should move, what emotions they should convey, and how each of the four cameras should capture the action. Should they zoom in close, or get a reaction shot over the shoulder? How should the villain deliver his lines? These directorial deci­ sions will determine whether or not the scene works. "You've really got to know how to milk the drama," Stein says. "Other­ wise, it's just a bunch of people standing in a room, saying stupid stuff."

Although the scene has been mapped out in advance, Stein still needs to make many of these decisions in the midst of film­ ing, while the actors are delivering their lines. Most of the fake rooms on the Burbank sound stage have only two flimsy walls, with one camera positioned on each side. An additional camera

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records the center of the scene. As soon as the assistant director yells out, "Action!" there is a frenzy of activity offstage as the cameras pivot and Stein snaps his fingers, pointing to indicate which camera he wants to capture the action for each specific part of the scene. (This makes it easier for the editor to assemble a working cut later.) During complicated scenes, such as that birth scene with the two fathers, Stein looks like an orchestra conductor: his arms are never still. He is constantly pointing at different cameras, crafting the scene in real time.

How does Stein make these directorial decisions? After all, he doesn't have the luxury of filming twenty different takes from twenty different angles. "Given the schedule [of a daytime soap opera]," Stein says, "there isn't time to be fiddling around with all the stuff that directors normally fiddle around with. You need to make the right decision the first time around." If a soap direc­ tor makes a mistake while shooting, the scene can't be re-shot another day. When you're creating daytime television, you have only one day.

This relentless time pressure means that Stein can't afford to carefully think through all of his camera choices. He doesn't have time to be rational; he needs to react to the drama as it's unfolding. In that sense, he is like a quarterback in the pocket. "When you shoot as many scenes as I have," Stein says, "you just know how things should go. I can watch an actor say a sin­ gle line and know immediately that we need to try it again. When we're filming a scene, it's all very instinctual. Even when we go in with a plan on how to shoot it, that plan will often change in the moment, depending on how it feels."

The reliance on instinct and "feel" is also a crucial part of the casting process. Soaps are continually bringing on new actors, in part because the longer actors are on the show, the higher their salaries are. (That's why established characters on Days of Our Lives are constantly being killed off. As Stein quips, "This isn't show art. It's show business") For a soap opera, there are few

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decisions as crucial as casting. The size of the audience oscillates with the appeal of the actors, and a particularly appealing actor can create a spike in the ratings. "You are always looking for that person that people want to look at," Stein says. "And I don't just mean attractiveness. They've got to have it, and by it, I mean everything that you can't really put into words."

The question, of course, is how you identify it. When Stein first started directing television, he was overwhelmed by all the different variables involved in casting. First, he'd try to make sure that the person looked right for the part and could act in the soap style. Then Stein needed to consider how this actor would fit in with the rest of the cast. ("A lack of chemistry has ruined many a soap scene," he says.) Only after that was Stein able to think about whether or not the actor actually had talent. Would he deliver his lines with sincerity? Could he cry on demand? How many takes would he require before he got the scene right? "Given all of these factors," Stein says, "there can be a tendency to really outthink yourself, to talk yourself into choosing the wrong actor."

After directing daytime television for decades, however, Stein has learned how to trust his instincts, even if he can't always ex­ plain them. "It only takes me three to five seconds before I know if the person is right," he says. "A few words, a single gesture. That's all I need. And I've learned to always listen to that." Re­ cently, the show put out a casting call for a male lead. The char­ acter was going to be the new villain on the show. Stein was up in his office, blocking a script, watching the auditions out of the corner of his eye. After a few hours of seeing dozens of differ­ ent actors recite the exact same lines, Stein was getting bored and discouraged. "But that's when this one guy stood up," he says. "The actor didn't even know his lines because he had got­ ten the script late. I just saw him say a few words, and then I knew. He was unbelievably great. I couldn't explain why, but for

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me he completely stood out. What they say is true: you just get a feeling."

The mental process Stein is describing depends on his emo­ tional brain. Those twinges of feeling that help him select the right camera and find the best actor are a distillation of all those details that he doesn't consciously perceive. "The conscious brain may get all the attention," says Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist at NYU. "But consciousness is a small part of what the brain does, and it's a slave to everything that works beneath it." Ac­ cording to LeDoux, much of what we "think" is really driven by our emotions. In this sense, every feeling is really a summary of data, a visceral response to all of the information that can't be accessed directly. While Stein's conscious brain was blocking the script, his unconscious supercomputer was processing all sorts of data. It then translated that data into vivid emotional signals that were detected by the OFC, allowing Stein to act upon these sub­ liminal calculations. If Stein were missing his feelings—if he were like one of Damasio's patients—then he would be forced to carefully analyze every alternative, and that would take for­ ever. His episodes would be constantly delayed and he would cast the wrong actors. Stein's insight is that his feelings are often an accurate shortcut, a concise expression of his decades' worth of experience. They already know how to shoot the scene.

W H Y A R E O U R emotions so essential? How did they get so good at finding the open man and directing soap operas? The answer is rooted in evolution. It takes a long time to design a brain. The first clumps of networked neurons appeared more than five hundred million years ago. This was the first nervous system, although at that point it was really just a set of auto­ matic reflexes. Over time, however, primitive brains grew in­ creasingly complex. They expanded from a few thousand neu-

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rons in earthworms to a hundred billion connected cells in Old World primates. When Homo sapiens first appeared, about two hundred thousand years ago, the planet was already full of crea­ tures with highly specialized brains. There were fish that could migrate across the ocean using magnetic fields, and birds that navigated by starlight, and insects that could smell food from a mile away. These cognitive feats were all byproducts of instincts that had been engineered by natural selection to perform specific tasks. What these animals couldn't do, however, was reflect on their own decisions. They couldn't plan out their days or use lan­ guage to express their inner states. They weren't able to analyze complex phenomena or invent new tools. What couldn't be done automatically couldn't be done at all. The charioteer had yet to appear.

The evolution of the human brain changed everything. For the first time, there was an animal that could think about how it thought. We humans could contemplate our emotions and use words to dissect the world, parsing reality into neat chains of causation. We could accumulate knowledge and logically ana­ lyze problems. We could tell elaborate lies and make plans for the future. Sometimes, we could even follow our plans.

These new talents were incredibly useful. But they were also incredibly new. As a result, the parts of the human brain that make them possible—the ones that the driver of the chariot con­ trols— suffer from the same problem that afflicts any new tech­ nology: they have lots of design flaws and software bugs. (The human brain is like a computer operating system that was rushed to market.) This is why a cheap calculator can do arithmetic bet­ ter than a professional mathematician, why a mainframe com­ puter can beat a grand master at chess, and why we so often confuse causation and correlation. When it comes to the new parts of the brain, evolution just hasn't had time to work out the kinks.

The emotional brain, however, has been exquisitely refined by

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evolution over the last several hundred million years. Its soft­ ware code has been subjected to endless tests, so it can make fast decisions based on very little information. Look, for instance, at the mental process involved in hitting a baseball. The num­ bers make the task look impossible. A typical major-league pitch takes about 0.35 seconds to travel from the hand of the pitcher to home plate. (This is the average interval between human heartbeats.) Unfortunately for the batter, it takes about 0.25 sec­ onds for his muscles to initiate a swing, leaving his brain a paltry one-tenth of a second to make up its mind on whether or not to do so. But even this estimate is too generous. It takes a few mil­ liseconds for the visual information to travel from the retina to the visual cortex, so the batter really has fewer than five milli­ seconds to perceive the pitch and decide if he should swing. But people can't think this quickly; even under perfect conditions, it takes the brain about twenty milliseconds to respond to a sen­ sory stimulus.

So how does a major-league baseball player manage to hit a fastball? The answer is that the brain begins collecting infor­ mation about the pitch long before the ball leaves the pitcher's hand. As soon as the pitcher begins his wind-up, the batter auto­ matically starts to pick up on "anticipatory clues" that help him winnow down the list of possibilities. A torqued wrist suggests a curveball, while an elbow fixed at a right angle means that a fast­ ball is coming, straight over the plate. Two fingers on the seam might indicate a slider, and a ball gripped with the knuckles is a sure sign that a wavering knuckleball is on its way. The batters, of course, aren't consciously studying these signs; they can't tell you why they decided to swing at certain pitches. And yet, they are able to act based on this information. For instance, a study of expert cricket batters demonstrated that the players could accu­ rately predict the speed and location of the ball based solely on a one-second video of the pitcher's wind-up. The well-trained brain knew exactly what details to look for. And then, once it

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perceived these details, it seamlessly converted them into an ac­ curate set of feelings. For a hitter in the major leagues, a hanging curveball over the center of the plate just feels like a better pitch than a slider, low and away.

We take these automatic talents for granted precisely because they work so well. There's no robot that can hit a baseball or throw a football or ride a bicycle. No computer program can fig­ ure out which actor should play a villain or instantly recognize a familiar face. This is why when evolution was building the brain, it didn't bother to replace all of those emotional processes with new operations under explicit, conscious control. If something isn't broken, then natural selection isn't going to fix it. The mind is made out of used parts, engineered by a blind watchmaker. The result is that the uniquely human areas of the mind depend on the primitive mind underneath. The process of thinking re­ quires feeling, for feelings are what let us understand all the in­ formation that we can't directly comprehend. Reason without emotion is impotent.

One of the first scientists to defend this view of decision-mak­ ing was William James, the great American psychologist. In his seminal 1890 textbook The Principles of Psychology, James launched into a critique of the standard "rationalist" account of the human mind. "The facts of the case are really tolerably plain," James wrote. "Man has a far greater variety of impulses than any other lower animal." In other words, the Platonic view of decision-making, which idealized man as a purely rational ani­ mal defined "by the almost total absence of instincts," was ut­ terly mistaken. James's real insight, however, was that these im­ pulses weren't necessarily bad influences. In fact, he believed that "the preponderance of habits, instincts and emotions" in the hu­ man brain was an essential part of what made the brain so effec­ tive. According to James, the mind contained two distinct think­ ing systems, one that was rational and deliberate and another

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that was quick, effortless, and emotional. The key to making de­ cisions, James said, was knowing when to rely on which system.

Just look at Tom Brady. It's his feelings that allow him to make quick passing decisions in the pocket. For Brady, the proc­ ess probably works something like this: After the ball is snapped, he drops back and tries to make sense of the field. He begins go­ ing through his checklist of receivers. The primary target, a tight end running a short crossing pattern, is tightly covered. As a re­ sult, when Brady glances at the tight end, he automatically feels a slight twinge of fear, the sure sign of a risky pass. The presence of the linebacker has been translated into a negative emotion. Brady then proceeds to his secondary target, a wide receiver run­ ning a deep out. Unfortunately, this target is double-teamed by a cornerback and a safety. Once again, Brady experiences a nega­ tive feeling, an instant distillation of what's happening on the football field. A few seconds have now elapsed, and Brady can feel the pressure of the defensive line. His left tackle is being pushed backward; Brady knows that he's got to get rid of the ball soon or the game is going to end with a sack. He proceeds to his third target. Troy Brown is streaking across the center of the field, threading the seam between the linebackers and the cornerbacks. When Brady looks at this target, his usual fear is replaced by a subtle burst of positive emotion, the allure of a receiver without a nearby defender. He has found the open man. He lets the ball fly.